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2 Art s Big Bang Michael Elins and the grape Kool-Aid origins of the imaging universe By Lorna Gentry I m an unintentional trailblazer, says Los Angeles artist Michael Elins. He says this not because he s modest, although he is, but because it s true. Elins story is one of serendipity, curiosity, timing, talent and vision. Illustration sucked him in as an art student and spit him out a decade later. The digital explosion the Big Bang of the art world recast Elins career and jettisoned him into the evolving meld of photography and illustration. Today he s one of the most successful artists in the business, doing covers for all the major U.S. magazines, photographing superstars and creating movie posters. I m grateful for the way my career unraveled, says Elins. I can t take All images Michael Elins

3 credit for it. I m not smart enough to have known what was to come, to have known that one day I would combine photography with painting and create something new. You know how grape Kool-Aid was invented? These two people were in a lab putting chemicals together and it smelled like grapes. That s analogous to me. The only thing I can take credit for is that I was smart enough or brave enough to keep doing it. Following the Big Bang, the imaging You know how grape Kool-Aid was invented? These two people were in a lab putting chemicals together and it smelled like grapes. That s analogous to me. The only thing I can take credit for is that I was smart enough or brave enough to keep doing it. Michael Elins

4 I love my Photoshop. I am one with the Photoshop. What I do is not retouching, it s re-imagining. I infuse my aesthetic into these pictures using the tools of photography and painting.

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6 cosmos is expanding rapidly as technology and creativity spark, collide and carom in new directions. Sent swirling in the digital plasma, Elins soon became a major planet in the solar system of commercial art. Think of him as Saturn, Lord of the Rings. After all, he did the movie posters. Movie posters are quite different from Elins bread-and-butter editorial work. Most days, Elins is a staff of one. In editorial design, he does it all, from concept to execution. Not that he doesn t work collaboratively with a number of talented souls, but Elins vision and talent make him a freestanding imaging kiosk. But with movie posters, the process is very much a collaborative affair. The film studio hires an agency, which in turn parcels out the design duties: art director, photographers, graphic artists, designers, printers, and more. No matter where he jumps in, though, Elins is hard-wired to movie posters, so it s always fun. After all, they re what drew him to California in the first place. In his 20s, as a junior illustrator at a large Chicago art house, Elins was content. He d realized his goal. A graduate of the American Academy of Art in Chicago, he d received rigorous classic training, and landed a great job working with top-notch illustrators. Life was good. Then one day as he sat gazing at a movie poster on the wall of his office, it occurred to him that maybe, just maybe he could create such posters. So he moved to L.A. in the mid-1980s and starting making movie posters, as well as other commercial art projects. But once my talent and experience were starting to come together, the business itself was becoming less viable. Hot in the 1970s, illustration was eclipsed by photography in the 80s. Still, Elins worked steadily. But in 92 when Rich Taylor, a mentor from his Chicago days, asked him to help run the L.A. office of his digital imaging business, Elins was ready to retire his paintbrushes. He accepted. In those days, imaging meant roomsize mainframe computers. We worked on Quantel Graphic Paintboxes, which cost half a million, and Iris printers that were over $100,000. Elins opened his own post-production business and started playing around with the computers, using them to paint photographs. Curious, his clients, some of them very well-known photographers, began asking him to digitally illustrate their photos. Then a fashion editor named Elizabeth Stewart from The New York Times Magazine called to brainstorm an idea, says Elins. When I asked her who was shooting the project, she said, You are. I knew enough to get started, such as lighting and composition, all that I d learned in art school. What I didn t know and had to learn was the process of photography, working with a subject. It s very intimate, so different from painting. I take that experience with me into the studio afterward and it goes into my painting. Doing his own photography is a freeing experience for Elins and he really gets into it. He uses medium-format cameras most often, sometimes digital, but mostly film ( I m just not completely, utterly in love with digital. ). His shoots are highly collaborative, with an experienced producer, several assistants, hair stylists, makeup artists, props stylists, an art director and caterers. But when it comes to working on the computer, Elins is alone. I create as I go, so it s hard for me to let other people assist me in 44 PEI SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2003

7 the most seemingly menial tasks, such as masking or editing. He hunkers down on his Power Mac G4/500, calls forth Photoshop, and lets his imagination rip. I love my Photoshop. I am one with the Photoshop, he chants. What I do is not retouching, it s reimagining. I infuse my aesthetic into these pictures using the tools of photography and painting. That s about as close as Elins gets to explaining what he does. The artist is the worst person to ask what he s doing. It s coming so fast and furious that in a couple of years, I ll be able to say, Oh, so this is what I m doing. But more likely it will be the marketplace that tells me. In fact, it s hard for Elins to even classify himself. One of the ways to know that we re at a new chapter here is that there isn t a lexicon to describe what it is I do. Some say photomontage, others say photo illustration. There s no precedent. It s a new paradigm we ve stumbled upon and we re very much at the beginning. Another beginning for Elins is exploring continuity between various mediums, such as print to Web and video to broadcast. Last year he did images of Alanis Morissette for The New York Times Magazine, then animated them for the magazine s Web site. Eventually the piece was turned into a video. It was a challenging project that inspired him to experiment further, trying out such techniques as combining traditional photography with 3-D, then animating the combination. I don t think we know if re-purposing print images or video for the Web is that viable or interesting, Elins speculates. In the future there s going to be a style of work that is somewhere between a print image and full-on video image that s perfect for the Web. Chances are good that as this new style evolves, Elins will be a bellwether of the genre, riding the zeitgeist like a comet streaking through the Milky Way. To see more of Michael Elins work, visit his Web site, Lorna Gentry is a freelance writer and editor in Atlanta.